Plastic Read Free Page B

walls.
    The streets were as silent as those of my youth, but now they were filled with people-carriers, experimental parking layouts and signs on poles explaining penalties. Burglaries and car thefts and waves of graffiti rhythmically appeared as if a high, dirty tide of rebellion had risen and receded in the night. The residents organised teams to watch houses, to secure gardens, to scrub off the effluvium, fighting to maintain the area’s postcard appearance, but the communal effort robbed us of community, and we retreated suspiciously into our homes. We grew sick of digging sharpened screwdrivers out of high street flowerbeds.
    After that, the only time I glimpsed the city again was looking out of department store windows. I couldn’t see that marriage was shrinking my world. You don’t notice changes when they happen incrementally.
    The only existing postcard of the town where I spent ten years of married life shows a yellow brick parade of shop-fronts, a laundrette, a butchers, a newsagent, a green bus garage and a length of empty black tarmac beneath an improbable blue sky. The card had been produced when the parade was newly built and the town just completed. There’s a sense of bareness in the picture, of infant exposure to the world. Constructed on the expanding border of Kent and Greater London, Hamingwell sprang up fully formed. One day it was a mud-tracked building site, a black gap on an aerial night photograph, the next it was an official destination-board, a hotspot of shimmering yellow lights, its junctions freshly marked, its young trees nested in, its starter homes filled with slightly puzzled strangers, and I had been one of them.
    I was nineteen when I arrived there, two months a wife and six months pregnant. It was the first time I had been any distance from my parents’ house. I’m twenty-nine now, one week away from thirty, a birthday I won’t live to see.
    If you lower the postcard and reveal the scene behind it all these years later, you’ll find the laundrette boarded up, the butchers turned into a charity shop, and only the newsagents remaining in a dingy enervated version, its cracked windows pasted with faded lottery stickers. The bus garage is now a tower block and the road is full of fat-wheeled Japanese jeeps. The meadow from which the town took its name has been concreted over as a one-stop shopping plaza, and that, too, has failed. Thanks a bunch, credit crunch.
    The town lost its innocence; a schoolgirl was raped, a toddler went missing. The hopeful couples who came to Hamingwell moved on when the economic downturn hit, but up until three days ago I was still there. Ten years married and still childless, still cemented to the same man. My unborn boy had died, and the infection damaged my ovaries enough to make Gordon lose faith in fatherhood. In towns like Hamingwell, to be without children after a decade is to hang a sign around your neck saying ‘Incomplete As A Human Being’. With a little rearrangement, the town’s name spells ‘Am In Hell.’
    People stand up in meetings and admit I’m an alcoholic, I’m a shoplifter, I’m a Binge Eater. For ten years I was a Housewife – I’d tell anyone, not that anyone asked. On the rare occasions that I voiced any dissatisfaction, Gordon reminded me that at least he had married me, meaning that he might equally not have bothered. For years I kept the postcard on my bedroom table, to remind me that I was once as hopeful as the scene in the picture.
    I kept a clean house; scratch that, I kept an eerily immaculate house, so tidy it looked like a show home, because it had never been stained by emotion. Spotless sofas, price stickers on my wine glasses and yellow tie-tags on my scented bin-liners. I realised I was in a rut when I noticed that our cat’s diet was more varied than mine. At least his dried food came in three types. I kept busy. My husband worked late. My sinks smelled of pine. My surfaces shone. My days were full and my